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Comment by thibran | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how all these writings miss to explain how to figure out what a function/symbol does. When I want to know what print does in Python, I can type: help(print) and get some useful information. In Lisp there is a function too, that I wish someone told me when I was a freshman: (describe 'print)

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http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/CLHS/Body/f_docu...

documentation is also a good one to know. Common Lisp makes pretty much the entirety of the system available to you programmatically. Browsing the CL Hyper Spec is a good way to discover these things, too.

The specification is (mostly) exhaustive, but would make a very poor introduction into the language. Common Lisp the Language (2nd ed.) [1] by Guy Steele himself gives good background information, but I wouldn't recommend it as introductory text either (and it isn't meant to). Practical Common Lisp [2] by Peter Seibel does IMHO a pretty good job at that.

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/cltl2.html

[2] https://gigamonkeys.com/book/

> The specification is (mostly) exhaustive, but would make a very poor introduction into the language.

Did I say it was a good introduction? What are you replying to with this?

But it provides documentation of the language. See the topic above.

I agree, even if I question the idea.

That is, I love the idea of everything being exposed. And I dream of the idea of interacting with the system this way.

However, I can count on one hand the number of people I have worked with that new you could get documentation that way in python. The world has moved on to browsers being the expected place for all documentation. :(

Get the documentation about the function DOCUMENTATION:

  (documentation 'documentation 'function)

Any Lisp IDE (like SLIME/GNU Emacs, LispWorks, ...) will have ways to show documentation.

DESCRIBE is a more general tool, similar to INSPECT. Using runtime introspection.

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